Dracula: Texts, Culture and Value

1902 edition of Dracula

Hello and Happy New Year!

This year I find myself teaching Extension English 1 for the first time, and it's quite an exciting prospect. The Preliminary Module 'Texts, Culture and Value' pertains to the study of a core text and its replication across the ages in various manifestations. These manifestations are defined further in the syllabus as texts that have been 'carried forward', 'borrowed from', or 'appropriated into more recent culture'.

After a brief dalliance with Jane Eyre, I've jumped on board wholeheartedly with Dracula (which seems to be the popular option as we move into the new syllabus for the first time).

The way I see it, the reasons for choosing Dracula are:

• It's a good practice run for Frankenstein, which is one of the texts in the Elective I'm looking at doing for the HSC.
• There is a near-infinite variety of texts to look at that reinterpret, reinvent, and 'borrow from' from Dracula.
• The Victorian context of Bram Stoker's seminal horror novel is more than ripe for the sort of analysis needed to look at the 'values' part of the module. 
• Lots of other teachers in NSW are doing this option, which is very helpful for purposes of collegiality - which is not to be underestimated when tackling a brand new syllabus!

Over the last week or so I've been reading the novel to start off my programming. I finished it a couple of days ago, and I've made a chapter-by-chapter table of my annotations, which can be found here:

Dracula Notes - PDF

I've arranged the notes into three columns;

1. Example / Quote
2. A brief summary or identification of the techniques and what is happening in said example
3. Further notes explaining the author's purpose and/or the context and/or anything else that I thought was interesting

Reflection

I think it's important to model this sort of stuff for the students straight off the bat so they can see what they should or could be aiming for, especially when they're entering into a subject like Extension English 1. The table also assists with giving the students reference points for their own reading... I don't want the reading of Dracula to be unnecessarily difficult, I want it to be an illuminating experience that will serve as a jumping off point for wider reading and analysis. At this point, in a public system Western Sydney context, I see the name of the game as primarily being one of engagement and encouragement.

I saw American educator Ron Berger speak at the iOnTheFuture conference in 2016, and something he spoke about that was really inspirational was models of excellence. I mean, he spoke about a lot that I found inspirational (including feedback and the growth mindset - check out 'Austin's Butterfly' on Youtube to see what I mean) but his ideas around modelling helped me to better articulate one of the key parts of my practice as a teacher. 

I'd been submitting student assignments under fake names for a couple of years by that point and then using them as samples with classes, but that's a story for another day. The point is: in order to get students delivering work of high quality we first need to show them we expect.

The idea of making all the answers 'secret' flies in the face of everything we know about creating excellence in students. If we want someone to be good at something, we show them a model. For example, to be a good musician you need to see and listen to musicians performing. To be a good illustrator you need to look at drawings. Athletes study other athletes. So why is it, in English and other school subjects, that we often hold back on showing students what the 'answers' looks like? It's been great to see the idea of exposing students to exemplars become more and more predominant in education throughout the 21st Century, and it's something that's continuing to develop in some interesting ways. 

Anyway. In short, I want students to look at the attached table and the core text of Dracula and use it as an example of the level I want to see them working at. It's not intended as perfection, and I hope to show them other models as I find more of them, but, hopefully it's a good starting point. Students will be able to take this information and then use it to practise skills in constructing extended responses and other higher order forms of expression.